They Never Named Them: The 2016 Admission That Two Silicon Valley Billionaires Paid Scientists to Hack Us Out of the Simulation

In October 2016, buried inside a 10,000-word New Yorker profile of a startup investor, a paragraph appeared that should have stopped the news cycle cold. It didn't. Almost ten years later, the names it referenced have still never surfaced.

The line came from staff writer Tad Friend's profile of Sam Altman, then president of Y Combinator, today the CEO of OpenAI. Friend spent months following Altman through Silicon Valley dinners, off-record conversations, and the inner circle of tech's wealthiest. Most of the piece is about Altman's ambition, his rocket-fuel optimism, and his network. But on one page, almost as an aside, Friend dropped a single sentence:

"Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis... Two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation."

Two billionaires. Secret funding. Scientists on the payroll. No names. No follow-up. No corrections. No retraction. It's been sitting there, unanswered, since the Obama administration.

What the article actually says — and what it carefully doesn't

The full quote, on its face, is not speculation. Friend is not saying "some people I talked to think." He is reporting, in the voice of The New Yorker's famously meticulous fact-checking department, that two specific people — both billionaires, both in tech — had hired scientists and were paying them to study the question of whether reality itself can be exited.

What the article does not do is equally telling:

• It does not name the billionaires.
• It does not name the scientists, the universities, or the labs.
• It does not describe the methodology, the timeline, or the funding amounts.
• It does not say whether the research is ongoing, paused, or concluded.
• It does not return to the subject anywhere else in the 10,000-word piece.

For a magazine that prints the home addresses of arms dealers and the medical histories of Supreme Court justices, the omission is conspicuous. Either Friend's sources only agreed to the disclosure on the condition of anonymity — which means the billionaires wanted the story out but didn't want their names attached — or the magazine made an editorial decision to bury a confirmation of something its readers wouldn't have believed if it had been the headline.

Who are the two billionaires? The short list nobody verifies

The Silicon Valley press immediately started guessing. The names that surfaced — and have been repeated for almost a decade without confirmation — are:

Elon Musk

Musk is the most-quoted public proponent of the simulation hypothesis. At Recode's 2016 Code Conference, three months before Friend's article ran, Musk said the odds we are in "base reality" rather than a simulation are "one in billions." He has repeated variations of the claim on podcasts, on X (then Twitter), and at his own product launches. He is the obvious first guess.

Peter Thiel

Thiel, Altman's longtime mentor and an early Facebook investor, has spent the better part of a decade funding fringe science — life-extension research, seasteading, anti-aging blood transfusions. A 2016 New York Times piece on Thiel's "moonshot" investments noted his openness to ideas mainstream investors won't touch. He has known Altman for over fifteen years, which is the closest verifiable connection between the named subject of Friend's article and a billionaire who would credibly fund simulation-escape research.

The lesser-floated names

Jaan Tallinn, the Skype co-founder, has openly funded existential-risk research at the Future of Humanity Institute and elsewhere. Yuri Milner has poured money into Breakthrough Listen, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Either could fit. Neither has confirmed involvement. Neither has denied it.

The pattern across every candidate is the same: public obsession with the hypothesis, private fortunes, and a stated tolerance for "weird" research. None has acknowledged Friend's claim.

Why the confession was buried in a Sam Altman profile

The architecture of the disclosure is itself worth examining. If you wanted to leak a story that would horrify the public, embarrass shareholders, and trigger regulatory questions, you would not lead with it. You would slip it into the middle of a profile of a likable, ambitious, slightly-eccentric tech CEO and let it sit. By the time anyone re-read the piece looking for the line, the news cycle would have moved on.

That is precisely what happened. The follow-up coverage — CNBC, The Independent, ScienceAlert, IBTimes, Dazed, Vocal/Futurism — appeared within days of the New Yorker piece going live. Then it stopped. No investigative reporter at a major outlet has, to public knowledge, identified the billionaires in the nine years since.

Sam Altman himself has never publicly addressed the line. He has been interviewed thousands of times in the years since, including dozens of times specifically about AI consciousness, alignment, and the simulation hypothesis. The line in Friend's profile has not, in any of the interviews we can find, been put to him directly.

The hypothesis they're trying to escape

The simulation argument they're reportedly trying to defeat was formalized by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom in his 2003 paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?. The argument, simplified, says that at least one of the following must be true:

1. Civilizations almost always go extinct before reaching the technological capacity to run ancestor simulations.
2. Civilizations that can run such simulations almost always choose not to.
3. We are almost certainly already inside one.

The argument is not fringe. It's been published in peer-reviewed philosophy journals, debated by physicists at Caltech and Fermilab, and tested empirically — researchers including Silas Beane at the University of Bonn have proposed experiments that would, in principle, detect a "discretization" of spacetime consistent with an underlying computational substrate.

None of those experiments has returned a positive result. None has returned a definitive negative either.

What "breaking out" would actually mean

This is where the story gets stranger, not more reassuring. The mainstream physics critique of the billionaires' alleged project is not that escape is hard. It is that escape is incoherent.

The argument goes: if you are a process inside a simulation, any "experiment" you devise to detect your container is itself running on the container's hardware. You cannot use the system's own arithmetic to step outside the system. It is a finite version of the halting problem — and the operators of the simulation, if they exist, could simply roll back the universe state to a moment before you noticed anything was wrong.

So why fund it?

Three possibilities, in descending order of charity:

• Genuine intellectual curiosity. Billionaires can afford to throw money at unfalsifiable questions the way the rest of us throw money at Powerball tickets. The expected value is essentially zero, but the cost is essentially zero too.
• An asymmetric bet on consequence. If the simulation is real and you can find the exit, the payoff is literal omnipotence. If it isn't, you spent some change. Pascal's Wager for the post-Christian wealthy.
• Something they think they already know. This is the unspoken implication of the original disclosure. You do not hire scientists to chase a hypothesis you find merely interesting. You hire scientists when you believe, or have been told, that the work might actually produce something.

The silence is the story

It has been almost a decade since Friend's article was published. In that time:

• OpenAI — Altman's project, partially funded by Musk — has shipped systems whose internal representations cannot be fully explained by their builders.
• Musk has publicly speculated, on multiple occasions, that we are in a simulation.
• Thiel has funded an expanding constellation of "weird science" through Founders Fund and his personal vehicles.
• No mainstream outlet has identified, on the record, who Friend was referring to.
• No scientist has come forward, even anonymously, to describe the work.
• No paper has been published in any indexed journal that traces back to a billionaire-funded simulation-escape program.

That last point is the one we keep getting stuck on. Silicon Valley is famously leaky. NDAs break. Disgruntled employees talk. Graduate students publish. Nine years of completely sealed lips on a project that was confirmed in print is not how academic research, even privately funded academic research, behaves.

There are exactly three explanations for the silence, and all of them are uncomfortable.

1. The work never existed. Friend was misled by his sources. The New Yorker's fact-checking failed. This is the establishment-friendly read, but it requires us to believe that one of the most respected magazines in America printed an uncorrected, unretracted fabrication for a decade.
2. The work existed and was abandoned. The scientists were paid, produced nothing, and walked away. In this case, we would expect a former participant to have written a memoir or LinkedIn post by now. None has.
3. The work exists and is ongoing. The funding has continued. The NDAs have held. The researchers either believe in the project enough to keep quiet or are compensated enough to.

What they're not telling us

We do not know who the two billionaires are. We do not know who they hired. We do not know what those scientists have or have not found. We do not know whether the work is alive or dead. We know only that, according to a paragraph printed by a magazine that does not retract carelessly, two of the wealthiest people on Earth decided that the question of whether reality has an exit was worth their money.

And then everyone — the magazine, the candidates, the alleged researchers, and the press — agreed to stop talking about it.

That is the story. The simulation hypothesis is interesting. The physics is interesting. The philosophy is interesting. The cover-up of a confession published in plain English in The New Yorker is more interesting than any of them.

Sources

• Tad Friend, "Sam Altman's Manifest Destiny," The New Yorker, October 10, 2016. newyorker.com/magazine/2016/10/10/sam-altmans-manifest-destiny
• "Tech billionaires think we live in the Matrix and have asked scientists to get us out," CNBC, October 7, 2016. cnbc.com
• "Two Billionaires Want to Help Break Humanity Out of a Giant Computer Simulation," ScienceAlert. sciencealert.com
• "Tech Billionaires Are Asking Scientists For Help To Break Humans Out of Computer Simulation," Slashdot, October 6, 2016. slashdot.org
• "Tech billionaires funding ways to break us out of the Matrix," Dazed. dazeddigital.com
• "Simulation Hypothesis: Tech Billionaires Funding Research To Get Out," IBTimes. ibtimes.com
• Nick Bostrom, "Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?", Philosophical Quarterly, 2003.
• "Breaking into the Simulated Universe," IEET / Edge.org, October 30, 2016. ieet.org

If you worked on, were approached about, or have firsthand knowledge of the research described in Tad Friend's 2016 article, you can reach the editors of TheyTellUsLies through the contact form. We protect sources.